Once there was Mystery Science Theater 3000, then there was Cinematic Titanic.  Or did the Film Crew come first.  At any rate, bad films means a good time for those who riff for laughs.  Lead, from behind by Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, in a reasonable fascimile of MST3K, keep the commentary hot and heavy.

The two I have seen, Killers from Space  and

The Giant of Marathon, pretty much stick to the formula.

Nice to see the concept still has legs.  Worth watching for those who like mocking genre.

Nothing screams a B Grade horror flick like the word piranha.  In its second manifestation no less, this fish bites man story has every expectation of being pure drivel.  True there is the diabolical government/business meddling, the profit blinded capitalist, and the brave and beautiful voice in the wilderness.  Estranged lovers, dumb tourists as fodder, and cheap special affects complete the haze.  The fish are as hard to swallow as the dialogue.  Flying about like the Blue Angels, these American bred miscreants even pop up out of human chests.

Unsurprisingly, James Cameron directed this “aliens from the ocean” story.  Later on he’d play off these themes with the Alien franchise and the Titanic epic.  Lance Hendriksen, from Aliens circa 1986, must have made an impression of Cameron during Piranha as Lance plays the cop with the copter.  Like both Aliens and Titanic, there are plenty of humans sacrificed unnecessarily to beat the band.   Maybe not for everyone, P 2 fits into the lazy Saturday movie watching schedule.

Every now and then the SwapShop at the town dump turns up paydirt.  A few weeks ago, I found the following:

Facing the Giants:  A football flick I sense is a feel good, along the lines of an evangelical action piece.  Play on.

The A-Team:  Good golly, a re-make of a classic.  None of the original crew.  Oh what’s the point? Silly show, silly movie, silly me.

Jesus:  This one never made it out of its original wrapping.  I almost don’t want to break the seal,  But you have to open to learn.  I wonder how many film treatments (non-documentary) have been done on Jesus.  Always interesting to see the interpretations.  Fascinating stuff.

The year, 2011, was hardly cheery.  However the last Netflix movie I saw was a sweet little number.  It was a documentary called Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story.  This movie originally aired via PBS.

Growing up I never learned to read or play music.  Nonetheless I was big on writing poems that I just knew could be turned into songs.  At UNH, where I went to school, my hopes that a budding musician could combine talents with a budding lyricist were cordially crushed.  To this day only one friend, Diana from Portsmouth, has offered to give it a go. (And her encouragement is forever appreciated).

The movie focuses on the forgotten sub genre of music, the fee for music, where VERY ordinary people jot down some lyrics and for a fee, get a studio band to cut an album, however modest.  Most of the music industry considers the song=poem crowd to be strictly garbage.  But just as self-publishing has given the publishing industry crotch burns, song=poeming gives voice to the voiceless. (And a note to those who poo-hooed my poems—Bernie Taupin was a man of words rather than music and he met someone (Sir Elton John) who gave a darn).

So there is hope, even if none of the song-poems ever became a hit.

This is both uplifting and a tad bittersweet movie.

Happy 2012 folks.

Syfy Channel pumps out a fair stream of films on B quality disaster/horror fare.  The theme and the format are cookie cutter.  Leaky CGI and location pimping replace  the real thing.  There are dumb as bricks doubters and evil doers that get their come uppance.  The heros and/or heroines have perfect BMI and you can bet the babes are blond and blue eyes.  Finally the writing is, to be polite, an abatoir of truly bad cliches.  

One such piece of mildly enetertaining “disaster drama” is Megafault.  As the name implies  there is a geologic fault and it is big trouble.  OK, who does NOT want to see a geologic trainwreck on a national scale.  Add some far out technology and bunch of button pushers, and bam, there goes the neighborhood.

The catcher is the part of the movie that the producers unknowingly swing the movie on a word or phrase that completely changes the movie.

In this movie the blond geologist and her sidekick are waiting to set off the last chance explosions to save what is left of America.  Fretting about the already evident destruction and her family (they always seem to go missing in these situations), the geologist is down and gloomy.  Her sidekick offers these words to comfort her–thereby deserving a bitch slap which he does not get because she does not get it (that goes for the rest of pudding head producers)—”Well, don’t feel bad, it’s NOT YOUR FAULT” (cap emphasis).

Your a geologist baby.  Damn right its your FAULT. Sweet irony–fault, fault, get it?  You both should be doubled over in laughter.  Millions dead, but what a one liner.  You almost wish another disaster comes around.  Nothing like unintenional humor–that remains unrecognized–to destroy a disaster (double meaning) of a movie.

WRF? Never heard of Commonwood? Ever hear of the Class of 53′ Dartmouth College?  They recently underwrote the renovation of a dinning hall at Dartmouth College.  The Class had a big ceremony, lots of food, speeches, and a guy with a movie camera.   The result was a limited and restricted issue, in a classy disc holder.  Dartmouth 53′ has hit the big times.  The Upper Valley has reached new heights in film production.  And the movie?  Stay tuned.

Silent films are making a comeback.  Many have re-discovered and revived films thought lost or forgotten.  Below is a link to the blog of Jeff Rapsis who plays for the silents in community venues for the benefit and enrichment of all.

http://www.silentfilmlivemusic.blogspot.com/

The shows are an experience of the old school.  Here the “Picture Show” comes back to life born by the flicker of the screen and tickler of the ivories.  Jeff plays New England, but there are sure to be others across the land making a future for the past. 

Support the Arts

Set in sunny dry Arizona, filmed in wet and wild Vermont, Arachnia is a homemade horror show that is both very quaint and oh so predictable.  Some of the actors in this low budget bug tussle show talent and buff up some of the dialogue.   The critters, tied to the meteorite that causes the plane to go down, are basically claymation 21st century style.  While most of the film is unremarkable, the tug of war between two giant spiders and a very unlucky dude bears mention.   While his companions look on “helplessly”, the guy screams to all get go.  Finally the guy goes his separate ways and the screaming (thankfully) ends.  Pretty chilling. 

But I could never accept the fallen foliage topography as old Arizona.  This is horror lite and something to watch for mild entertainment from Maplewood

Termed Shaun of the Dead with bugs, Infestation is crawling with slapstick and a whole mess of nasty critters.  Well made, witty lines, and the usual song and dance storyline, the movie leaves lots of unanswered questions and room for a sequel.  The pace is steady and the CGI is damn near flawless.  Kudos for stylish man v. bugs and for shooting in Bulgaria.

Chris Marquette played with great relish the annoying young slacker and self -centered anti-hero.  Pretty much 50 50 comedy and horror, it, as others have noted, bears re-watching.  Note: the bugs are pretty gnarly creatures.  I say that as the human-bug hybrids are just ghastly.

A Japanese title for a Filipino movie.  Actually there is an alternate title Mahal Kita.  Either way it is translated to English as “I Love You 1941“.  This is yet another gem of a movie lost for and to the majority.  The movie has a European double.  Black Book (reviewed before) takes on the issues faced by conquered peoples—in this case the Nazis raising hell in the Netherlands.

For Aishite Imasu 1941 it is the same story—collaboration, love, betrayal, mistaken identity, resistance.  This movie goes beyond Black Book by throwing in homosexuality, cross dressing, and one hell of a finale.

The movie is complex and can be hard to follow.  Yet it shows the inflections of perceptions that blind black and white (not colors, but right and wrong) fail at.

Forget the production details, go for the lives challenged–including the conquerors who were still very human.